Life Fiction

The tiny, well-ordered seaside village of Merham holds little to interest the adventurous - except for Arcadia, the breathtaking art deco house perched above the shoreline. Attracted to this magical place, young Lottie Swift surrenders freely to its temptations and ultimately must face the hard consequences of her actions. Years later, another young woman comes to Merham. A designer hired to make over the now-empty Arcadia, Daisy Parsons seeks a new beginning, as Lottie once did. Fleeing a broken relationship, Daisy finds refuge at Arcadia, and something more - a love she thought she would never know again.

At 27, having fled an abusive marriage with little more than her kids and the clothes on her back, Ivy Peterman figures she has nowhere to go but up. Quaint, historic New Bern, Connecticut, seems as good a place as any to start afresh. With a part-time job at Cobbled Court Quilts and budding friendships, Ivy feels hopeful for the first time in ages.

"Dear Libby, It occurs to me that you and your two children have been living with your mother for - Dear Lord! - two whole years, and I'm writing to see if you'd like to be rescued." The letter comes out of the blue, and just in time for Libby Moran, who - after the sudden death of her husband, Danny - went to stay with her hypercritical mother. Now her crazy Aunt Jean has offered Libby an escape: a job and a place to live on her farm in the Texas Hill Country.

ALA Schneider Family Book Award-winning author Wendy Mass offers this tasty treat of a tale sure to appeal to any listener’s sweet tooth. The Candymakers follows 12-year-olds Logan, Philip, Daisy, and Miles as each tries to invent a candy even better than the Oozing Crunchorama. But with these contestants—who can detect chocolate by touch and lift 50 lbs. of taffy as if it weighed no more than a loaf of bread—it’s going to be a close race.

It's been over a decade since Nora left her hometown of Scupper Island, Maine, and very seldom looked back. She's carved out a successful life in Boston, where no one knows her as the awkward girl with the delinquent sister and the dad who left, but a not-as-dramatic-as-it-sounds brush with death has her taking stock of her life. Inspired to reconnect with her prickly mother and snarky teenage niece, Nora returns home for the summer, where she's forced to face the people she's spent the last ten years trying to avoid.

In New York Magazine, Rhoda Koenig calls The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, "...a novel of blazingly hot revenge, one that amply illustrates the saying about heaven having no rage like love turned to hate, nor hell a fury like a woman scorned."

In this third installment of the Minecraft Gamer's Adventure series, Steve is invited to participate in an elite building competition on Mushroom Island. His friends - Max, Lucy, and Henry - are impressed and want to join their friend on a journey to the island. Yet not everyone is happy: Steve's neighbor, Kyra, is upset because she wasn't chosen as a contestant.

Nickelodeon's PAW Patrol become super pups after a mysterious meteorite crashes near Adventure Bay. But can Marshall, Chase, Skye, and the rest of the team stop Mayor Humdinger from getting powers and using them for his own sneaky purposes?

Leo wanted to make something out of himself—and build dams. However, the world doesn't want dams. And it mostly doesn't want civil engineers. It doesn't want men who do any sort of building or fighting or grand design, it seems. So, when Leo finds his current girlfriend and boss being threatened by a brutal loan shark and all three of them get dragged through a portal to another world, it doesn't take long for him to decide this is the place for him. Plus, everyone has magic, and who wouldn't want that?

One of the most extraordinary literary documents to have emerged from the Soviet Union, this is the story of labor camp inmate Ivan Denisovich Shukhov and his struggle to maintain his dignity in the face of Communist oppression. Based on the author’s own experience in the gulags, where he spent nearly a decade as punishment for making derogatory remarks against Stalin, the novel is an unforgettable portrait of the entire world of Stalin’s forced work camps.

Mr. Quark is a down-on-his-luck pot smuggler hiding out in the mountains of Columbia with his dog, High Pockets, and a small band of banditos led by the irascible José. Times are lean, and to liven up their exile, José decides to mug a family of American tourists. Among the spoils are physics texts, which launch Mr. Quark on a sidesplitting, boisterous adventure north to California, where he confronts the owner of the books with his own theories.

Tristan isn't gifted or talented like his sister Jeanine, and he's always been okay with that because he can make a perfect chocolate chip cookie and he lives in the greatest city in the world. But his life takes a turn for the worse when his parents decide to move to middle-of-nowhere Petersville - a town with one street and no restaurants. His suspicions about his new town are confirmed when he's tricked into believing the local general store has life-changing chocolate cream doughnuts, when in fact the owner hasn't made them in years.

Gail Baines is having a bad day. To start, she loses her job—or quits, depending on whom you ask. Tomorrow her daughter, Debbie, is getting married, and she hasn’t even been invited to the spa day organized by the mother of the groom. Then, Gail’s ex-husband, Max, arrives unannounced on her doorstep, carrying a cat, without a place to stay, and without even a suit. But the true crisis lands when Debbie shares with her parents a secret she has just learned about her husband to be. It will not only throw the wedding into question but also stir up Gail and Max’s past.

National best-selling author and New Mexico native Michael McGarrity takes listeners to the wild territory of the late 19th-century American Southwest for this epic tale. After the deaths of his wife and brother, John Kerney gives up his West Texas ranch and heads south in search of a new home. Soon Kerney is offered work trailing cattle to the New Mexico Territory - a job that will forever change his life.

In the course of her everyday work, career-driven assistant district attorney Nina Frost prosecutes child molesters and works determinedly to ensure that a legal system with too many loopholes keeps these criminals behind bars. But when her own five-year-old son, Nathaniel, is traumatized by a sexual assault, Nina and her husband, Caleb, a quiet and methodical stone mason, are shattered, ripped apart by an enraging sense of helplessness in the face of a futile justice system that Nina knows all too well.

Edgar Hill is 35 and caught in his own headlock. Overweight slob, underperforming husband, and reluctant father - for Ed, the world may as well have already ended. So when it does end in a catastrophic asteroid strike and Edgar and his family find refuge in an Edinburgh army barracks, it comes as something of a relief. But nothing's ever that simple. Returning from a salvage run in the city, Edgar finds his family gone, taken to the south coast for evacuation by an international task force.

Leda, a middle-aged divorcee, is alone for the first time in years when her daughters leave home to live with their father. Her initial, unexpected sense of liberty turns to ferocious introspection following a seemingly trivial occurrence. Throughout the novel, Ferrante's language is as finely tuned and intense as ever, and she treats her theme with a fierce, candid tenacity.

Clayton Burroughs comes from a long line of outlaws. For generations the Burroughs clan has made their home on Bull Mountain in North Georgia, running shine, pot, and meth over six state lines, virtually untouched by the rule of law. To distance himself from his family's criminal empire, Clayton takes the job of sheriff in a neighboring community to keep what peace he can.

Popular author Dan Gutman has won countless fans with a trademark brand of humor that young readers find irresistible. In this second entry from the My Weird School series, second-grader A.J. gets sent to the office for not doing his homework. But things take an unexpected turn when Mr. Klutz, the skateboarding principal, gives A.J. a candy bar for encouragement.

Iris Lockhart is busy tending to the everyday business of her vintage clothing shop and her complicated love affairs when she receives a stunning phone call. Her great-aunt Esme, whom she never even knew existed, is being released from a psychiatric hospital where she has been locked away for over 60 years.